


Even in Another Time

by Glinda



Series: Sappho Quotes Prompt Table [1]
Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Academia, F/F, Femslash, Friendship, Memories, unrequited Jillian Holtzmann/Abby Yates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-27 08:55:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7611694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are her friends and she will ensure they are remembered when she’s gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even in Another Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my prompt table from [](http://femslashficlets.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://femslashficlets.dreamwidth.org/)**femslashficlets**. The prompt was Sappho 16. someone will remember us

  
Her girls are obsessed with documenting things. They keep detailed records of their experiments; write articles for scientific journals that will never publish them, and record hours of tape and video of experiments and sightings. And then of course there is Abby and Erin’s book.

For the two of them evidence is the most important thing. It burns at the heart of their friendship, that need to prove everyone who ever mocked them or disbelieved them wrong. Abby revels in having her faith justified and Erin makes it a penance for all the sacrifices she made in vain. (Friendship, love and career.)

Holtz keeps detailed records too, though they are rather more haphazard. She documents all her experiments, learning vast amounts from seemingly tiny factors. She disguises it well, but once Patty notices it, she can’t stop seeing the way that Holtz watches everyone carefully. Observing her friends like scientific phenomena, that if she just studies closely enough will reveal their secrets and explain their mysteries. Patty learns to explain when she catches Holtz watching her like that, to expound on experiences and articulate unspoken emotions. Holtz may be one of the most emotionally stunted people that Patty has ever met, but that doesn’t mean she feels those emotions any less strongly. Still waters run deep with that girl.

She finds evidence in support of her hypothesis in odd places. In lab books and on DV tapes tucked in between technical drawings and exploded diagrams. Little sketches and fragments hoarded and hidden treated casually as though that will make them somehow matter less. Patty finds her own hands carefully rendered alongside drawings an improved design for the proton packs trigger mechanism. She spots Erin’s box pleats and half a dozen other fussy details of her outfits among a pile of discarded equations. The familiar curve of Abby’s smile – of her cheek, of her eyes, her hips, her hips, of the curl of her hair that so often falls loose when she’s working hard – a poem of affection and unspoken devotion. A testimony of all the things their brave, beautiful engineer will not risk – something too precious to risk losing. Patty gathers up the abandoned fragments, squirrelling them away somewhere safe, in case they’re ever needed. It’s not until she starts to find the curve of her own grin, her own eyes looking back at her from the page that she realises that Holtz has noticed her watching back. Patty never was afraid to push back – to flirt back – whenever Holtz is being particularly…herself. But now, she does some pushing of her own, reminding her girl that she is seen; will be remembered. For who she is as well as what she does. There is risk there, but the rewards – in shining eyes and secret smiles, weird in-jokes and a thousand little inventions marked with a thousand more little kisses - are so worth it.

Patty keeps her own records. Her discoveries are seemingly more prosaic: historical details and oddities. Useful sources and good contacts slowly fill her notebooks and she tucks them into the shelves that keep her books and box files safe from Holtz’s experiments. And because she knows her Holtzy as well as she does, she keeps digital backups of everything in two separate places - one on site and one off. She also keeps a journal of her own, determinedly informal, as different as possible to the dry historical records or the stiff scientific reports. Patty knows all too well that it is the personal stuff that is truly vital in their work. That the human details of someone’s life or death can save the team’s lives in a confrontation with a vengeful spirit. So she keeps her journal, records the little details that make them human and real, the kindness and loves, alongside the hurts and grief that lie behind the faces that they show to the world. They are her friends and she will ensure they are remembered when she’s gone.


End file.
